Trash With a Cause

by Albert Pear

Uwe Boll has been making movies for the better part of three decades, and it is almost impossible to write about him without also writing about money — how strange it is that a director this widely, almost gleefully, reviled has directed something like three dozen features, most dumped straight to disc, several of them financed through a German tax shelter so ingeniously cynical that losing money was the entire business model. Every so often, though, Boll stops churning out genre trash for tax purposes and makes something out of pure grievance, and Citizen Vigilante is the grievance movie of the summer: an hour and a half of aggrieved American manhood dressed up as a thriller, made by people who wanted it loud far more than they wanted it good.

The premise is lifted, more or less wholesale, from a real and genuinely horrifying Hamburg court case, the one that ended with a judge handing down suspended sentences to a gang of teen-age rapists. The film opens on a related atrocity — a mother stabbed to death in front of her son — but this turns out to be scene-setting rather than backstory; the boy isn’t Sanders, and Sanders doesn’t get, or apparently need, so tidy an origin. He is simply an American businessman, played with a kind of hollowed-out stiffness by Armie Hammer, who has relocated to Croatia — standing in, in the time-honored tradition of the cut-rate international co-production, for the whole undifferentiated continent of Europe — and has curdled, in a diffuse and never quite explained way, at the sight of a justice system that no longer seems to punish anyone. That the movie can’t be bothered to give its hero a personal wound, just a generalized fury borrowed from cable news, tells you most of what you need to know about how little it trusts its own premise. He starts small: humiliating bullies, embarrassing a judge who exists mainly to be embarrassed. By the climax he has graduated to executing an entire family in their home, and Boll’s camera, for possibly the only time in the picture, snaps into focus. The sequence is genuinely tense, competently staged, almost accomplished — which is the most unsettling thing about it, since it is also the one sequence built, with real technical care, to make an audience cheer a massacre.

I don’t think Citizen Vigilante is a good movie in any sense that word usually carries at the movies. The cinematography has the flat, underlit look of a production that spent its budget on permits and none on lighting; the pacing drags out scene after scene — a police convoy inching toward a farmhouse, a monologue that could have been a sentence — as though Boll, having rented the trucks, meant to get his money’s worth out of them. Hammer, who once had a kind of oiled, patrician charisma, plays the whole thing at a single flat pitch, delivering lines that sound workshopped by a man who has spent too much time arguing with strangers online. At one point his character all but paraphrases a since-notorious line about immigrants and their character, delivered with the smugness of someone who believes he’s being daring rather than derivative. There is no wink in it, no ironic distance, none of the tonal cover that lets an audience tell itself it’s watching a metaphor rather than an argument.

Boll has said, more or less proudly, that part of the appeal of hiring Hammer was precisely his disgrace — that a man already unemployable in respectable Hollywood has nothing left to lose by playing a righteous avenger, and comes cheap besides. He’s floated Kevin Spacey for the sequel on similar logic. There’s a certain shabby honesty in saying the quiet part out loud like that, and it clarifies what Citizen Vigilante actually is: not a message movie that happens to star a controversial actor, but a project built around the frisson of watching disgraced men play innocent ones. Hammer, to his very limited credit, doesn’t try to sell us on Sanders’s warmth; he plays him as a man performing righteousness the way you’d perform a return from exile — a little too eagerly, with his eyes on the door.

That absence of cover is, I think, the real story of why this dinky, underfunded exploitation picture spent a week as the most talked-about movie in the English language. Death Wish and Dirty Harry sold their audiences a fantasy of order restored by force, but they also left just enough ambiguity for critics and viewers to argue about their own complicity — is the picture critiquing the vigilante impulse, or feeding it? Scorsese built an entire career on that kind of productive confusion, letting Travis Bickle be both a monster and a mirror. Boll doesn’t bother with confusion. Sanders is never wrong, the system is never anything but craven, and the film closes with a dedication to real victims that plays less like tribute than alibi — a way of daring you to call a revenge fantasy tasteless when it claims to speak for the aggrieved.

None of that would have mattered much on its own. Boll has built an entire career on dedications nobody reads past the first clause, in movies nobody outside a clearance bin has seen. What turned Citizen Vigilante from a barely distributed curio into an actual event was the machinery that assembled itself around it, seemingly by accident. Germany’s ratings board balked at certifying the film at all, which meant, in practice, that it couldn’t be sold there — a decision made, I’d guess, in complete sincerity, and one that did exactly what such decisions always do: it turned a mediocrity into a martyr, and made “banned in Germany” the single most effective marketing line of the year. Within days the world’s most conspicuous social-media owner had posted the entire film free to hundreds of millions of followers, and a fringe curiosity became, for a news cycle or two, inescapable. Boll, who has spent his career being called a hack — not unfairly — got to spend a few weeks this summer being hailed instead as a truth-teller, mostly by people who had not actually watched the film he made.

That’s the part I keep turning over: how little the movie itself has to do with its own success. Nobody I’ve encountered who actually sat through Citizen Vigilante, including people sympathetic to its politics, is prepared to defend it as filmmaking; even its warmest reviews tend to praise the message and apologize for everything surrounding it. What travelled wasn’t the picture. It was a clip stripped of context, a regulatory headline, a billionaire’s endorsement — each one doing the persuasive work that the film’s own craft was far too thin to do by itself. Citizen Vigilante didn’t become dangerous by being a good piece of propaganda. It became dangerous, or at least unavoidable, by being cheap enough, blunt enough, and badly timed enough to be useful to people who were never planning to sit through the ending anyway.

There’s an old, glum lesson here about the difference between an idea’s popularity and its persuasiveness, and about how little either one now depends on quality. A better filmmaker with the same premise could have made something genuinely troubling — could have forced an audience to sit inside the logic of vengeance long enough to feel its pull and its cost, the way the best of this genre always has. Boll doesn’t do that work, and I suspect he never intended to; incoherence has been his métier for twenty-five years, and this time it happened to rhyme with the news cycle. What’s left on screen is a cheap, ugly, poorly paced revenge picture that would have vanished in a week if the culture around it hadn’t needed a movie, any movie, to hang its argument on. I walked out feeling less as though I’d seen a piece of propaganda than as though I’d watched propaganda’s delivery system run a live test — and pass, without any help at all from the picture itself.